Finding Effective Vaccine Distribution Strategies: A Retroactive Study of COVID-19 in New York City

Abstract

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States was under-prepared, facing a shortage of personal protective equipment, hospital beds, and vaccines, and difficulties with allocating resources like vaccines across communities. Some communities received too few vaccine doses, while others received too many. To explore this problem, we used records of COVID-19 vaccine distribution allocations to simulate the effect of different roll-out strategies on the COVID-19 outbreak in New York City, one of the hardest hit cities. We find that targeting doses uniformly or targeting them towards susceptible communities or low income communities all lead to lower case counts compared to the actual roll-out. Our findings aim to help epidemiology and public health experts in the event of future outbreaks of a similar nature and scale as COVID-19.